


Don't Fear the Reaper

by MrsSaxon



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Discussion of Death, F/M, Fluff, Gen, It's less painful this time I SWEAR, Karen and Frank talk in a diner... again, Post-Season 2, Pre-Romance, afterlife mentions, friendship!, reaper au, reaper!Frank
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 12:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10640298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsSaxon/pseuds/MrsSaxon
Summary: From anyone else, she would have assumed they were lying through their teeth and she’d have left immediately. But Frank wasn’t the type to lie to her for no reason, to say something this batshit crazy without really believing it.





	

Frank Castle was not real.

Falsified birth certificate, no childhood paperwork, undocumented parents. Undocumented not in the sense they weren’t from this country, but in the sense that they did not exist. Period. Had never existed.

To say Karen had questions was putting it mildly.

“What the fuck is going on Frank?!” was more emotionally honest.

“Why’d you decide to keep digging?” Frank muttered in return as Karen harangued him in a construction site.

She didn’t even notice the question. “ _Who_ are you? Why is everything you ever told me a lie?!”

“Not everything.”

“I want answers, Frank,” Karen jabbed his chest, “you’re going to start making some sense right now or I will call the cops.”

Frank snorted.

“And then call Matt.”

Frank sighed, squinting around the room. “I’m famished, you hungry?”

“Frank!”

“You’re hungry, c’mon, I’ll pay.”

-

“Man, good fries. You can’t get real crispy fries just anywhere these days,” Frank considered as he tucked in.

Karen said nothing over her cup of black coffee.

“You don’t want anything? Thought you were hungry,” he stalled.

“Frank,” Karen warned.

Frank chewed and swallowed. “You’re a smart woman, ma’am,” he murmured, not looking at her, “What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know, Frank! The paperwork isn’t adding up,” she raked a hand through her hair, “And I came all this way...” She paused and self-consciously lowered her voice, worried her frustration was attracting attention. “I came all this way and I’d just like an explanation, please.”

Frank looked up and met her eyes. He waited a measured beat and then only came out with “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Her eyes glowed like hellfire. “ _Fr-_ ”

“I’m telling the truth,” he offered before she could get fully derailed in anger, “You said yourself, I always tell you the truth.”

“That was before I found out that you _don’t exist_ ,” she hissed.

“Didn’t,” he corrected.

“What?” she gasped.

“Didn’t. I didn’t exist, technically.”

“Wait, wait, back up. What does that mean?” Karen blinked at him, leaning forward.

Frank leaned back, pushing away his fries, unfinished. “I didn’t have parents. Or a childhood. I don’t actually know how old I am, but I do age, so... that’s a thing.”

Karen’s mouth parted. From anyone else, she would have assumed they were lying through their teeth and she’d have left immediately. But Frank wasn’t the type to lie to her for no reason, to say something this batshit crazy without really believing it.

“So...” she swallowed, unable to think of anything to say after that, “so...” She started again, “A-are you a government experiment or something?”

Frank’s face split into a smile. “No, no,” he chuckled, “I’m not a super soldier. I’m uh... something else.”

Karen blinked at him. “Okay, you’re gonna have to give me more than that.”

Frank drew a deep breath. “I’m a reaper.” He looked up at her, swallowing.

Karen’s diaphragm shuddered. A painful, disconnected laugh bubbled harshly up her throat as her eyes welled. “You’re the grim reaper. You’re the grim _fucking_ reaper, of course you are, why didn’t I think of that?!” She looked away, rubbing her eyes, sure she was finally cracking up.

Frank reached for her free hand, trying to center her. “Hey, hey, I said ‘a’ not ‘the’, now just listen. I said you wouldn’t believe me.”

Karen turned back to him, eyes still watery, but accusing. “Are you for fucking real right now, Frank? I swear to god, if you’re fucking playing me-”

“I’m _not_ playing you, ma’am, I promise! I’ll hand you my gun if it helps.”

“I’m supposed to believe you’re only carrying one?” Karen snorted.

Frank’s lips quirked. “See, you know me. You know I’d always have a back up. You know I wouldn’t play you like this.”

He had a point. Karen breathed, feeling oddly calmer as he reminded her how much she already knew about him. “Okay... okay, Frank,” she nodded, settling back in her seat.

“Thank you,” he nodded back, “and you wanted in on this story, least you can do is sit there and hear it out.”

“Yeah, well, maybe this will finally teach me not to follow my curiosity,” she sighed.

Frank grinned, “No, it won’t.” After a moment, Karen smiled too.

Frank sucked in a cold breath over his teeth and let it out again. “I don’t... actually know how it happened, what started it. All I can remember is slowly becoming conscious. I mean, I wasn’t... me when it started, I didn’t have a concept of me yet. I was just a reaper.”

“Was?” Karen interrupted cautiously.

“You see me sitting in front of you, don’t you?” Frank gestured to his body.

Karen nodded.

“If I was still reaping, you wouldn’t see that. I’d be even less than a ghost, less... autonomy even than that,” Frank sighed, “Reapers don’t have a will. We don’t have a choice. We don’t have thoughts enough _to_ have a choice. We just... take the souls and don’t think nothing about them. Good, bad, old, young, we don’t know and we don’t care. That’s for others to decide.”

More questions popped into Karen’s mind, scrunching her eyebrows, but she kept them to herself. She guessed that even if she asked, Frank probably couldn’t answer most of them.

“But I... sooner or later, I started to care. I started to have thoughts. And I started to want to decide for myself who should live and who should die. I don’t know how many souls I took before it started, I can’t remember, any of it. But a reaper is always there, in the moment of death, and we see everything. And I started to remember certain faces. People I kept seeing in moments of death. The people who were responsible for them. I kept wondering when was it gonna be their turn, when would they get theirs, after they put so many people in the grave. That’s how it happened.”

Karen shook her head. “How what happened?”

“How I stopped being a reaper and became me,” he looked her in the eye, “I killed someone. Someone I wasn’t supposed to.”

“And that- that did it?”

“I decided,” Frank leaned forward, “I broke the rules. See, reapers don’t get to decide, we’re not equipped with the ability to even try. And I don’t know by what miracle or damnation I got the ability, but I fucking used it. I killed that son of a bitch because I thought he deserved to die.”

Karen swallowed hard. “You became you.”

Frank blinked, drawing back, realizing he was frightening her. “Yeah.”

Karen took his silence to breathe for a few minutes, trying to wrap her head around someone popping into existence after being a non-sentient, barely anthropomorphic concept of death. “Okay, so... let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she held her hands out in front of her for a visual guide, “first you were... not alive. Not even self-aware, like... how? I, I don’t understand.”

“It’s not easy to,” Frank murmured, scratching his chin, “It’s like… knowing you existed as a baby, but you can’t remember it. Only for me, I didn’t get to age into it. I know I existed before I can remember, but I don’t know what was happening then. I just started remembering and I had no context and no identity. I thought in broad, vague strokes, but the first thing I had was recognition.”

“Who did you recognize?” Karen frowned, trying to grapple with this concept by asking after the details she _could_ grasp.

“It was this guy, this two-bit trafficker, liked to take out his problems personally,” Frank glowered, “His name was Gus, he had patchy sideburns and a mean stare. I’ve met assassins with more kindness than him.”

“But how could you recognize him? You weren’t there, really.”

“It’s how reapers reap,” Frank shrugged, “We’re with the dying when they die, we see everything they see. Feel… what they feel. At least I did, when I could remember.”

Karen swallowed. “You… die with them?”

Frank nodded. “Mmhmm. We don’t go where they go, of course, but we die. We are death.”

Karen’s head spun. She leaned forward over the table to ground herself, dipping her head in her hands. Frank had already died… innumerable times. But he couldn’t tell her what was there afterwards or what it was like, only that something did happen.

“Ma’am, could we get an ice water over here please? Thank you,” Frank asked of the waitress, giving Karen as much time as she wanted.

“There you go,” Frank murmured, setting the glass beside her face when it came.

“Thank you,” Karen gasped, hoarse, before gulping down half of it, the painful cold of it clearing her head for a second.

“It’s um… it’s rough to hear. We don’t have to-”

“So why did you kill him? When did you decide? _How_ did you decide?” She wouldn’t look at him, but she still insisted.

Frank exhaled, looking at the table. “Same reason I kill today.”

Karen’s brow creased and she tried looking up at him, the question plain on her face.

“You try dying over, and over, and over again, and see if it doesn’t give you a new appreciation for murderers.” Frank’s eyes turned dark and flinty, his voice deepening with distaste.

“Is… dying that bad?” Karen whispered.

Surprise washed over his face and his eyes dropped, reconsidering how he’d phrased that. “No, not always. Some old guy in their sleep, no, no pain at all. Even relief sometimes. But murder…” His eyes flashed, threatening to go dark again.

Karen nodded hesitantly; Frank’s story was starting to make some kind of sense. Though she still had to buy that the… whatevers that ferried souls? that 1) they existed, 2) died with the dead, and 3) could break out of the cycle by means of whatever Frank did, apparently. It was a lot to swallow, but she did ask why the earliest record of him she could find was his volunteering to the marines and literally nothing before that. This _was_ the story she had asked for.

“So– so after all these experiences of death, now that you could remember them, you decided murder was bad,” Karen supplied, attempting to summarize the course of events as best she could.

“I decided it needed to be stopped,” Frank clarified, “that people were being hurt for no reason and with no recourse. I wanted it to stop.”

“And then you murdered someone yourself,” Karen continued, clearing her throat, “Just like that. Some real strong convictions, Frank.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Frank’s voice rumbled underneath hers, barely heard.

“Then what was it like?” Karen frowned, intent on the crux of the story.

“I didn’t know he- I didn’t mean to-” Frank sighed, took a breath, and started again, “It all happened in an instant. I came to another victim of Gus’, a woman who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When I saw it was Gus I knew what was coming and I just wanted to stop it. I thought if I could just… be in him rather than her, I could stop him. And it happened, just like that, soon as I thought it.”

Karen leaned forward. “You moved to him?”

“Didn’t know I could do that. And I wasn’t there long, my only thought had been to ‘stop him’ and that’s what happened. He stopped, cold and dead, fell over right in front of her. I didn’t mean to kill him,” he shook his head, “But this is what happened. And it’s the only way I’ve found to stop people like him.” Frank looked up at her, ready to fight if that’s what she wanted.

Karen swallowed, breaking eye contact immediately. “So tell me the rest then, tell me how you got to be here.”

“I thought I’d take his soul now, but instead I was stripped out of him, or he was stripped from me, however you want to think about it. Next thing I knew, I was in another body. But this body wasn’t dying. It was alive. When I tried to move out of it, I couldn’t, and I found my thoughts moving this body instead and… that’s how I became me.” Frank looked up at her, finally finished, a half-deprecating smile on.

“You killed someone… so you stopped being a reaper,” Karen murmured.

He nodded. “Yep. That’s what I figured anyway. Took me awhile to find all the words for what had happened to me.”

“How… how many other people know?” She had to ask.

Frank raised an eyebrow. “People who are still alive? Just you.”

Karen’s nervous smile was automatic, but in truth the idea that this secret was that closely kept comforted her. It meant she didn’t have to worry about the government coming after Frank. Or her for that matter.

“Eh… not all of them are dead by my choice.” Frank coughed.

“What? Oh!” Karen realized how her face must look. “No, no, I’m sorry, of course not, I just… it’s good. It’s good that no one knows. I’d hate to think of you being used to… I don’t know,” she whispered.

“I’m not too much a fan of being a lab experiment either,” Frank mused, pulling his mug of black coffee forward and taking a drink now that he was finished talking. “But you never answered my question.” He leaned back, folding his arms.

“What’s that?” Karen blinked.

“Why’d you dig?” He smirked.

Karen inhaled sharply. Her lips pursed, looking everywhere except at Frank. “Truth?”

Frank nodded solemnly. “Please, ma’am.”

She exhaled slowly, deliberately controlled. “I’ve um… spent a lot of time and effort defending ‘the Punisher’. And with gaps in your record it-”

Frank finished the sentence for her. “You thought I was hiding something from you.”

“Well, you were,” Karen reminded him.

“You know what I meant.”

Karen said nothing.

“And you thought you were owed this information,” Frank sighed, “because you… you defend me in the press?” He shook his head. “No one asked you to-”

“No! No, because you’re- because you’re my friend,” Karen interrupted, swallowing.

That gave Frank pause. “Then what does… being my friend have to do with defending me in your paper?” he murmured.

“I thought, if I was in on it, I could help you lie about it. At least you’d have a public story, on record, that you could refer to. And, honestly, now that I know what it was, I still think that’s a good idea.” Karen looked up at him hesitantly, absently tugging the small charm on her necklace back and forth.

Frank didn’t look up, focusing silently on the table. “That _is_ a good idea,” he said, looking up.

Karen exhaled in a gust, unaware she’d been holding her breath. “So, you’re- you’re not mad at me?”

Frank cocked his head and stared at her for a hard moment. Karen could feel the air temperature in the room drop a degree. She bit her lip, waiting.

“Well, we’re friends aren’t we?” he smiled slowly, “I’ll get over it.”

Karen lit up like the sun. “Let me buy lunch then, to make it up to you.”

“You haven’t eaten anything!”

“It’s the thought that counts, Frank!”


End file.
